by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a trio of music shows on KPBS,
including a much-ballyhooed one called Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs. It’s a Las Vegas cabaret act featuring actor,
singer and former Tony Awards co-host Alan Cumming — who successfully
eradicated his native Scottish accent for his role as the slimy political
consultant Eli Gold on The Good Wife
but showed it off big-time in this context. Apparently his major
musical-theatre chops are portraying the Master of Ceremonies in two major
Broadway revivals of the musical Cabaret in 1998 and 2014 — he joked in last night’s show that he’d forgotten
most of the show in between because of how much he’d been drinking, so he had
to sneak over to a library containing videos of Broadway musicals just to
remember how it ended. (“Spoiler alert: it does not turn out well,” he joked.)
Given the title and the mind-numbing sameness of the songs, especially the
first four, I assumed that this was a parody of a cabaret show, with all the songs written either
by Cumming himself or the same team of songwriters working hard to sustain the
mood of introspective gloom throughout. Then the fourth song turned out — after
Cumming sang it — to be one from the oeuvre of Miley Cyrus, and the fifth song turned out, after
an interminable interlude from Cumming to the effect that he was dedicating it
to his grandfather, who fought in Southeast Asia during World War II, stayed
there after the war, joined the Malayan police force and was killed there in
1951, to be Billy Joel’s “Goodnight, Saigon.”
Written during Joel’s brief
flirtation with a “serious” phase (from an album called The Nylon
Curtain in which Joel tried out some Sgt.
Pepper-ish “production” effects and kicked
it off with a great song about deindustrialization called “Allentown” that I
thought was as good as anything Bruce Springsteen has written about the
subject), it was so pretentious a song and so removed from the realities of the
Viet Nam war (as I’ve learned about them not only from my readings but from the
people I’ve known over the years who actually fought in it) I joked that it
could have been called “Everything I Know About Viet Nam I Learned from
Watching Apocalypse Now.” Even so
— and even without the sorely missed “echo” effects Joel put at the end of some
of the song’s lines (“And we were sharp/As sharp as kni-i-i-i-ives”) — the song
made an effect by its sheer differentness from everything else on the program. Cumming followed that up with an
old song from his native town called “Mother Glasgow,” first in what he called a
“chi-chi” version in which he explained the meanings of the Scottish slang
terms used in the song and then as a slow, serious ballad that actually sounded
rather moving. Then he did a song called “You, You, You (Everywhere You)” from
one of those stories that got adapted into a musical even though it shouldn’t
have: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play The Visit, in which a woman who was driven from her small
Swiss town in shame because she had a pre-marital affair and got pregnant
becomes the richest woman in the world, returns to the town where she was born,
and offers to bail it out of its financial difficulties if only they’ll execute
the man who ruined her way back when. It was composed by John Kander (whose
most famous credits, written with the late Fred Ebb as lyricist, were Cabaret and Chicago) to a book and lyrics by Terrence McNally. Needless to say, the song
we heard was a mindless love ballad that gave no idea of the darkness of the
story for which it was supposedly composed!
After that Cumming told a story about how he and his brother
were regularly physically abused by their father, and followed that up with a
surprisingly bitter song by Rufus Wainwright called “Dinner at Eight” about his
chancy relationship with his
father. Cumming’s next piece was a song that seemed to wander all over the map,
which was no coincidence because after he sang it he admitted he’d mashed it up
from three separate songs — Adele’s “Someone Like You,” Lady Gaga’s “Edge of
Glory” and Katy Perry’s “Forever in Love” — as a sort of musical critique because the three songs sounded so much alike. He then
announced that he was going to sing his last song, only before he sang his last
song he announced that of course it wasn’t going to be his last song — that he was going to leave the stage
afterwards, bump into one of the cameras filming the performance, hang out
while his band members remained on stage (which, he said, “ought to give you a
clue”) and, after feigning reluctance, return for a supposedly “unplanned”
encore. The last song on his “official” program seemed variously to have the
title “Every Time I Hold a Rose,” and his supposedly “spontaneous” encore
started with a song apparently called either “I Believe” (though it was neither
of the two “I Believe”’s that were hits in the 1940’s and 1950’s) or “If Love
Were All,” and then segued medley-style into what was by far the best
performance of the night, Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Confronted
with a decidedly non-sappy song
taken at a considerably faster tempo than everything else he’d sung all night,
Cumming let his band overpower him at times but mostly spat out Sondheim’s
sarcastic lyrics with everything he had, offering the most convincing evidence
that we should take him seriously
as a singer and not only as an actor who sings occasionally. Just shows what a
great song can do for you!
